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10 Questions for Stephen Kampa

August 6, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

"Later he won't recollect who wore cardboard crowns--

as always, he stayed sober, the dork calling cabs
for lightweights who couldn't pace themselves till midnight."
—from "Size 12," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As I child—was I in fifth grade?—I invested significant energy in writing a novel. It was full of dragons and dwarves and mountains, and I no longer remember if it was midway through the first draft or upon completing it that I realized I had tried to rewrite The Hobbit. In retrospect, I take satisfaction in knowing I was a character in a Borges story.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the...

(Almost) 10 Questions for Sage Ravenwood

August 4, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

If you siphon hatred through skin and bones
Long enough, if you gut punch your heart
Hard enough, in between all the layers of
Who you are, you find
The will to live.
—from “Scraped from a Boning Knife”, Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I came into poetry rather recent (later than most), so that would be "Bullet Tithe" published in Glass Poetry —Poets Resist almost two years ago. "Bullet Tithe" was written the day of the El Paso, Texas shootings. Like everyone else at that time, I was trying to come to terms with the shock and overwhelming loss we were witnessing; At the same time I worried if it was my story...

10 Questions for Teddy Macker

August 2, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

As drone strikes fell from skies
and executed children
Mary Oliver did not abandon
roses busy being roses.
—from "Marguerite", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I first began writing in response to the beauty of girls. Maybe sixth grade. “Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder,” says D.H. Lawrence. In my little fumbling way, I’ve tried to acknowledge the wonder, while also remembering the insight of Robinson Jeffers:

Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?...

10 Questions for Suphil Lee Park

July 30, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

Do you hunger too? Rivers barging inland
fade shorelines
with the weight they have
carried.
—from "Gill" by Suphil Park, Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
A series of singsongy part-quartets about an abandoned bicycle that I jotted down in a music composition notebook that could have been, and might have worked better as, a simple haiku.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I tend to read senselessly and impulsively, and am quick to relent what I’ve read to my awful long-term memory, so I always find it difficult to extrapolate which individual writers or particular work might have contributed to my own...

10 Questions for Joshua Garcia

July 28, 2021 - By Marissa Perez

My therapist asks me why I think I always return to lack,
and it may or may not be related, but it's been on my mind,
so I finally tell him I might have been assaulted by my doctor.
—from "Poem with Starbucks and Kissing and Trees", Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I received a very generous rejection at age 12 from an unnecessarily kind editor at The New Yorker who must have understood that he was responding to a child. I only remember that the story had something to do with my dad, a school bus, and a sunset. One of the first poems I wrote that I took seriously as an adult, however, was “Wet Dream,” which is about memory and beginning to...